March 02, 2013

A while back I came across a
“semi-documentary”, written and directed by English filmmaker Carol Morley,
called Dreams of a Life. The
haunting and speculative 2011 film attempts to piece together the life of
38-year old Londoner, Joyce Carol Vincent. A beautiful aspiring singer and
seemingly gregarious woman of Indo-Caribbean and Afro-Caribbean extraction,
Vincent’s decomposed body was found in her North London bedsit flat;
having apparently died in late 2003, her remains went undiscovered for three
years despite neighbors noticing the smell of decomposition emanating from her
apartment.

I recall
reading about Joyce some years ago and feeling somewhat bothered by the few
fleeting details reported by the media about her; never able to recall reading
anything else substantive about her personal life, how she died, or even a
picture of her. Her story, or lack thereof, more-or-less dwindled and
disappeared from the media. Before watching Dreams of a Life, I
thought Joyce’s story was cut-and-dry, and that there was nothing more to be
told, beyond that of the sad life of a friendless woman with no family, who
died alone and unaccounted for. I never imagined, after all of this time, this
posthumous follow-up of Joyce's life would present a story far more compelling
than I could have ever imagined.